326 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It may be that it will be for the advantage of the world deliber- 

 ately to develop different kinds of men and women in the future. 

 We may get better general results by having brain specialties fostered. 

 We may thus have some families of special aesthetic power, some of 

 mechanical genius, and some of enduring muscular work, just as we 

 have pointers, greyhounds, and sheep-dogs. But even then it would, 

 be more than ever necessary to see that the special strong point did 

 not override and interfere with the general nutritive power and vital 

 energy. In training a greyhound, however anxious the trainer is to 

 get speed, he takes care that the dog is very well nourished while he 

 grows, and he never develops his speed till the growth is nearly done, 

 and the bones are set. He doesn't all the time he is growing run the 

 animal every day. He knows that would spoil the general strength, 

 and shorten the period of greatest activity. 



The development of special strong points during the process of the 

 education of children I believe to be of vast importance to the race, 

 but it must be done in accordance with Nature's general laws that gov- 

 ern the development of the organism as a whole. The special educa- 

 tion must be accompanied by the general development. It must not 

 be pushed to the extent that it absorbs energy needed for other pur- 

 poses. I can imagine no more interesting or important problem in 

 education than the successful cultivation of specialties. It is quite 

 certain that as yet it has not been solved or even studied to any ex- 

 tent. If you hear of a young lady now who is very musical, you 

 usually find she has so much music added to the grammar and the 

 French and German. It is as important in education to know what 

 things to omit as to know what things to press. It is enough to make 

 one despair of the inherent reasonableness of human nature to think 

 of the amount of time and toil that are given in Edinburgh to the 

 learning of things for which there is no inherent capacity in the learn- 

 ers ; things that go against the intellectual grain, that are learned 

 poorly and with much difficulty, against Nature ; and are forgotten at 

 once, in accordance with Nature's laws. Think of the girls who toil 

 at music, who have no inherent musical capacity ; of the time that is 

 taken in committing to memory rules of grammar, and doing parsing, 

 the real meaning of which the girls' brains could not comprehend, if 

 they lived till they were ninety ; of the labor and sorrow given to ac- 

 quire languages, by girls whom Nature meant only to speak their 

 mother-tongue ; of the futile attempts to take those past the rule of 

 three, whom Nature intended to stop at simple division. The sad thing 

 is that we all know each of those girls could do something or other 

 very well and to some purpose in after-life, if we could only hit on 

 what it is. 



I don't want to frighten any one unduly by the list of bodily and 

 mental diseases and defects that are in some cases attributable to wrong 

 methods of education that I am about to refer to. I would beg every 



